Introducing Amazon Simple Email Service

I love what Amazon is doing with AWS, and I like this new service a lot. Plus I'm a happy customer.<p>But damn this is all getting very complicated. First they turn off email, so you have to find a provider, then they turn it back on, but you have to pay them. Looking at my AWS console, I've got 8 or 9 tabs on there -- each representing a little piece of what I might want in an app. Each has it's own help section with bunches of docs to read to get up to speed. Each has it's own forum category. Each has a usage policy.<p>Don't get me wrong -- it's all good stuff. But good luck trying to guestimate what kinds of prices you'll be paying. You're paying for data transfer in and out of the cloud, you're paying for disk storage, you're paying for a database, you're paying for basic email services, etc.<p>So I'm kind of stuck looking at the monthly bill and saying "Does this look about right?" instead of having some firm idea of what's going on without having to use a spreadsheet and 3 whiteboards. That's no good. It's probably completely acceptable for BigCorp, who has a guy dedicated to figuring all of this out and managing it, but I'm busy and pressed for time all I want is the big red button to push -- and a known price for pushing it.<p>I love what they're doing. Just wish they'd put a little more "simple" back into it, especially in terms of pricing and bundling.

Sendgrid &#38; other such senders will be shaking in their shoes now. Personally, as soon as I have more time, I'll switch to the amazon service. Also, any new app I make will use Amazons service by default.<p>Sending email out is quite important for growth, and such services really help businesses.<p>What impresses me about amazon is that they are not looking at what the competition is charging or trying to charge high based off the fact that there are not too many such services, but are simply providing the service at a reasonable price.

I wonder how they will respond if an account gets over the allowed threshold of spam complaints. I could see them responding either by:<p>a) Cutting off the customer's use of Simple Email Service; or<p>b) (Much much worse) cutting off the customer's AWS account, including EC2 and so on.<p>I'm guessing a), but it would be nice to have assurances against b). Otherwise a false positive on the "they're using SES to spam" detection system could be catastrophic.<p>The SES docs just point to the standard customer agreement - <a href="http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/" rel="nofollow">http://aws.amazon.com/agreement/</a> - which doesn't appear to make any specific mention of SES terms and conditions.

You get a daily quota of 2000 messages if you're an EC2 customer. That's pretty competitive, and nicely within the limit of what I'm sending at this stage of my startup. Sold, well played once again Amazon.

Here's my blog post:<p><a href="http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-simple-email-service.html" rel="nofollow">http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2011/01/introducing-the-amazon-si...</a><p>If you like to solve puzzles, be sure to read the PS!

It seems they implemented a gradual increase of daily quota to protect themselves against spammer abuse.<p>Here's the link to the document describing the system:<p><a href="http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/ManagingActivity.PlanningAhead.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/...</a>

I wonder who's going to be the first to announce a SMTP proxy for this?<p>More seriously:<p>While I can kind of understand that Amazon has their API and probably wants this to work similarly, but there is already a wide-spread protocol for sending out email (SMTP) and I just can't understand why they can't provide an endpoint for that.<p>Many applications which I really see making use of this already have built-in SMTP support (and are using that today), so why force developers to work with another, completely different API to send email over Amazon?

If it works like they say, this is a godsend. Email is a royal pain and the pricing of SES is well below market rate. Postmark (<a href="http://postmarkapp.com/" rel="nofollow">http://postmarkapp.com/</a>) is similar and is $1.50 per thousand, compared to $.10 per thousand from Amazon.

Seems Amazon wants to fight it out with Google, by matching the new services with Google App Engine's free quota.<p>$0.10 per thousand in SES -&#62; $0.0001 per email recipient // Same as in GAE.<p><i>You can send 2,000 messages for free each day when you call Amazon SES from an Amazon EC2 instance directly or through AWS Elastic Beanstalk.</i> // Same as in GAE.<p>This, along with the recent AWS Elastic Beanstalk release and Amazon's intent of making Java hosting easy and without restrictions (<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2119104</a>) all point to the day when I will be able to upload my Python app on GAE directly onto a pre-configured Amazon service (possibly making use of AppScale or TyphoonAE), which internally uses all these new services with free quotas.

I like this. They are priced at 25% of sendgrid, which we use as we send a million emails a month or so. But sendgrid provides a dedicated IP address. Having a dedicated IP over a period of time helps with delivery as the IP 'reputation' increases based on your delivery rates.<p>A lot of EC2 Ips are blacklisted by ISPs because people just create instances and spam away using exim/sendmail. If amazon and keep its IPs clean and also manage the service well, this is going to be THE email sending service to use.

It amazes me how quickly AWS iterates and adds new features. Also, this is just what I needed for a site I am building (I was trying to figure out which third-party mail provider to use.)

So I was immediately looking at their REST API...<p>And true to form, Amazon adds yet another slightly incompatible request signing method.<p>Consistency is for wimps.

I wonder how well their mailing reputation is for high deliverability with this new service.. I've heard that mailing from EC2 was almost pointless due to its low reputation score

I suppose this will hurt the competition, sites like sendgrid and mailchimp.

AWS' pace of innovation is simply stunning. It shows that the business is not an afterthought for Amazon but rather treated as being of the same importance as their core business.<p>Compare that to AppEngine and you have to say they leave them behind in the dust. (I know it's not an Apples to Apples comparison.)

On the topic of sending e-mail, I discovered the following note on my utility company's bill payment page. I'm guessing they have never heard of SendGrid or the like.<p><a href="http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBFG75hiG3uBWhtFRwldtwQed8zbwHzVsQBpp6M872kvawj6D7ZqxfLrLfu/conservice.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://posterous.com/getfile/files.posterous.com/dennis/GGBF...</a><p>(They did not reply to my friendly e-mail about it. Or perhaps their box was over quota...)

Obvious followup: "Amazon Simple SMS Service". Watch out Twilio...

&#62; Start sending email in minutes through Amazon SES using the AWS software development kits for Java and .NET<p>I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the java ecosphere in terms of libraries and resources is unparalled.

I'm not so sure Sendgrid, Postmark, and other email senders should be shaking in their boots.<p>There's plenty of other businesses that leverage AWS technology and resell it for a higher price. I bet they add AWS as an option as a value added reseller.<p>If you have an existing email host integrated throughout your site, it might make more sense to just stick with them.<p>It will force them to lower their prices though.

bye bye postmarkapp, critsend, sendgrid, authsmtp, cloudsmtp ...

There is really no excuse to not launch a web application!

This is excellent. I recently moved a production website to EC2 at the last minute due to contractual disagreements with a hosting vendor. My next step was to sign up on SendGrid and configure postfix to use that for emails, SES will be better integrated into the AWS ecosystem.<p>As a lot of you may know, emailing out from EC2 is mostly impossible as all ISPs bounce them back

I want to be excited about this, but amazon basically destroyed any trust I had in them (at least the people that handle AWS). I signed up for the amazon free usage tier of AWS, excited to try it out, and really really loving amazon for doing something like that (giving away service for free).<p>I signed up, spun up an EC2 instance (careful to make sure that this really <i>was</i> free), checked it out for a few minutes, then moved back to my linode and slicehost boxen. I was excited to have another spare machine to try stuff out on for the next year (I really wanted to try nginx as a reverse proxy).<p>About a month later, I got a bill for $60 from amazon. I tried to find a support chat for AWS (like what slicehost has), but couldn't...tried to find a way of calling them...but couldn't. Finally I sent them some sort of feedback saying "Hey, was this a mistake? Why are you billing me for something that is free?"<p>The response that I got back was something like "The cost for AWS is $60/mo! Thanks for using AWS!"<p>To me, this is absurd, and is borderline fraudulent (although I'm sure it was a mistake). Luckily for me, I have a good job, and while eating $60 worth of amazon making a mistake is annoying, it isn't a catastrophe. This wouldn't have been true for me while I was in school though, and wouldn't be true for some of the friends I recommended give AWS a try.<p>I'm starting to think that stuff like this is where "the cloud" falls apart on people. If I have a problem with my Verizon Business internet, I can call them and talk to somebody until it's fixed. If I have a problem with one of our AT&#38;T telephones, same thing. If the power goes out at our building, I can call down to APS and find out why.<p>From what I can gather, this <i>absolutely</i> isn't true for google, or amazon, or any of the other "cloud" providers. If I build an email system myself, buy bandwidth/power/rackspace from a colo myself, and manage it <i>myself</i>, there aren't going to be any surprises. If it goes down, I can just look at why. Nobody is going to surprise me with a bill (except maybe the colo).<p>To be honest, amazon, I don't even plan on building anything on your platform...ever. Same goes for you, google. While I really really love the idea of cloud computering (or elastic computering), I definitely <i>don't</i> love the idea of some faceless company with no customer service of any kind who can arbitrarily just take money from me and doesn't care if I leave.<p>To me, stuff like this is a massive step backwards.<p>While not related to AWS, but more "the cloud" in general...look at what happened a few months ago when facebook's OAuth system bailed out for a few hours. Anybody dependent on facebook for login handling was simply SoL without really anything that they could do to solve the problem until facebook fixed it.<p>How is this desirable?<p>There was an article here yesterday (an it seems like something like this pops up just about every week) about how the days of the system admin are over. I wouldn't be so sure. You can yell at system admins until you feel better, you can call them endlessly at 3:00am until they wake up, you can tell them that they have to come in to the office RIGHT NOW and fix it RIGHT NOW. (I'm a sys admin, btw)<p>You can't do this to amazon, you can't do this to google. If amazon email service bails out...sorry, but call back later and maybe it will be fixed.

Well you have to love Amazon's focus on KISS (keep it simple, stupid) -- heck it's even called the _Simple_ Email Service! I can only imagine the number of (illustrious) tech companies that would have tried to dress this up like a revolution in computing.

Does anyone recommends a self-hosted webapp to manage and send the newsletters through AES/SendGrid/etc?<p>I would love to use mailchimp or campaignmonitor, but I only have users, not customers, and the high price ins't justified.

It seems like Amazon is friendlier than SendGrid about bulk marketing email.<p>Does this lower the barrier to entry for MailChimp/Constant Contact/Consumer Newsletter Service competitors?<p>Or are there other high technical barriers as well?

The future: Everything run by Google and hosted by Amazon.

hopefully, this improves the deliverability of email that originates within amazon's environment. the service can be easy, but if the messages aren't getting through, then there is no point and sendgrid and others will continue to survive.

Amazon's IP's have terrible email reputations and are blocked by lots of services. Unless they are opening up a new block of IP's, I'd be very concerned about my deliverability rates. SendGrid give me a dedicated IP which helps a lot over time.

I can't find it but can you send attachments as well?

considering the fact that 95% of all email is spam, the email service providers should implement a similar quota system to fight spam. actually it would be great if entire email ecosystem had something like this in its core.

no attachment support.. no mimetype support for anything but text and html.. not evident from the docs.. just errors when you try to send a jpeg<p>definitely still in beta

they are seriously taking over the world

I guess this is a great opportunity for individuals to provide services like aweber, mailchimp etc. Think about it, now you don't need to worry about the hardware. Provide a killer interface, make it super super easy and have a low monthly fee and let the user pay the amazon bill. ofcourse there are multiple revenue models but now is the opportunity.